Bites for Good– Charity Profiles and Benefiting Lesson Icons
Posted by Jason · January 28th, 2008“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
~ Sir Winston Churchill
Since the beginning, we have recognized the close link between learning, teaching, and doing good in the world. To that end, we have enabled authors to donate a portion, or all, of their lesson proceeds to a good cause. We have now rolled out some new features at MindBites to make these efforts more visible.
Hearts mark the spots – To see if a lesson will benefit a cause, now you can simply look for the heart icon on its lesson page. A pink heart signifies that a portion of author proceeds will go to the named cause, while a red heart means that all of the author proceeds will go to the cause.
Follow the hearts to find the real heroes – If you click on the heart or the charity names, you will be taken to a Charity Profile Page where you can learn a little bit more about the organization and its mission.
Here are a few of the lessons that already benefit some good causes:
How to Reformat Your PC Made Easy
Maudie’s Famous Salsa and Pico de Gallo
Tropical Home Aquarium - Low Hassle Approach Part 1
Why have we done this? To us, learning, teaching, and helping others all go hand in hand (in hand). For users, learning is all about growing. For authors, teaching is all about sharing what they know to help others. In this day and age, we all realize that the world is much larger than ourselves and many of us look for little ways that we can help make a difference.
How do charities get listed? Right now, we are beta testing the automated tracking and giving of money directly to the charities. Thus our team must manually register each charity. If you have an idea of a charity you’d like to have registered on the site, let us know Soon, we hope to integrate with one of the web charity directories which will greatly enhance the process.
Does all of the money go to charity or only the author proceeds? The heart indicators refer to the author proceeds from the lesson and not the total price the user is paying. The other portion of the proceeds go to cover costs such as the finance processing charges, bandwidth, storage, etc. In some cases, the MindBites team has elected to donate an additional portion out of our proceeds, but obviously until we become a sustainable business we won’t be able to do too much of that. We’ll try to always be clear about what is benefiting whom, and you have our word that enabling ongoing giving to good causes is a core part of our vision as we work to build our community and company.
Questions, thoughts ideas? Shout out to the MB community, either in the comments below or click here to go to the forums http://www.mindbites.com/forums.
Sphere: Related Content
Email This Post
Tags: Charities, MindBites Features | Posted in Life and Learning, MindBites News and Notes |
Subcribe to our RSS feed
January 30th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
This is a great idea! I don’t know anywhere else where you can do this…and I especially appreciate being able to request your own charity. Nice work!